Review: 2022 Garrison Brothers Bourbon Brawl Cocktail Kit

Last month, our friends at Garrison Brothers Distillery launched a cocktail competition to unearth the very best cocktail made using their unique Texas bourbon. The winner was crowned: Albert Pero III from New York. (New York!?), the founder and creator of Spirit for Spirits, “a bartending battle YouTube show that highlights all the amazing things people in the spirits industry are doing, both behind the bar and behind the bottle.”

All the ingredients for Albie’s BD4 cocktail have been packaged up by Cocktail Courier so you can make his winning libation, a spin on the Manhattan that mixes up Garrison Brothers Small Batch Bourbon with vermouth, earl grey tea syrup, chocolate bitters, and cherry bark vanilla bitters, then garnishes it with ground cinnamon. It’s available through August 7 for nationwide shipping.

The results are solid, if a bit on the sweet side; I’d advise dialing down the syrup quite a bit — maybe by up to half — though of course you’ll want to adjust to taste. While the Earl Grey flavor is subtle, the two types of bitters and the cinnamon give the drink a particularly festive feel. I’d hold on to the recipe for the holiday season, where I think it will feel more apropos than in the dead of summer. Either way, the extra ingredients are effective at dialing down Garrison Brothers’ heavy wood influence and allowing more of the fruity notes buried in the whiskey to shine.

The $89 kit makes up to 8 cocktails.

B+ / $89 / cocktailcourier.com

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